Since more of you are starting your own internal or external WWW
service, I thought that I would provide a couple of hints from what we
have learned. For how servers work, an excellent introduction to
writing HTML, and a good list of supporting tools I strongly recommend
the new O'Reilly book:
 
     Managing Internet Information Services
     By Liu, Peek, Jones, Buus, and Nye
     ISBN:  1-56592-051-1
     1-800-889-8969
     gopher://gopher.ora.com
 
This book is biased towards the NCSA server, but it does include a
good description of how CGI scripts work (until I got this book I
could not figure out CGI scripts). MPE/iX users of the NCSA server
should find the NCSA configuration file description useful.
 
We use getstats for producing statistics from our WWW server log
files.  You can try this out at:
 
     http://www.robelle.com/server.html
 
I have a small CGI script that interfaces between our server.html file
and the actual getstats program. Please e-mail me if you would like
more details (I have sucessfully compiled getstats for both HP-UX 9.0
and MPE/iX 5.0). I find that other server statistic programs produce
huge amounts of output. With getstats, you have a lot of control over
exactly what reports are produced.
 
The weblint perl script is excellent at finding errors in HTML. Note
that ALL references (excluding Robelle) on our HP3000 page:
 
     http://www.robelle.com/hp3000.html
 
have problems that weblint catches. Most problems are not serious, but
if you want to support the widest variety of WWW clients, you should
be using weblint.
 
You cannot turn on the TV or read the newspaper without hearing about
the Internet and WWW.  If you are providing WWW services, I hope that
these references will help.
 
Cheers,
 
David Greer     <[log in to unmask]>